As we were boarding a transatlantic flight, the captain came back from the cockpit to greet us. “Call me Buzz; that’s what everybody calls me,” he said as he shook my hand. “Seven-and-a-half hours tonight. It’ll be a quick trip over.”
Then he added: “They’re telling us that it should be a pretty smooth ride. But I’ve looked at the maps, and they’re not reading the air right. We’ll have a few bumps -- nothing serious -- just more than what they anticipate.”
Buzz should know.
He’s been a pilot for 26 years with the same airline -- “two away from retirement,” he told me with a grin. Across the years, he’s made this journey more than once before and has learned to read the maps and the clouds and between the lines of pre-flight briefings. True to his word, there were a few bumps on the way to London that night -- none amounting to much but still more than “a pretty smooth ride” might at first suggest.
As a passenger in the midst of the turbulence, there’s something deeply reassuring about knowing that someone like Buzz is at the controls. There’s something about a person who has amassed the experience and wisdom to read the environment and to name what’s happening even when others aren’t reading it the same way. There’s something about his confidence that makes you put your confidence in him. There’s something about his ability to lead by feel that leads to trust.
I imagine you’ve known a few “Buzzes” in your institution. You’ve known “the Buzz” who knew just when and how to approach a donor for that major gift. You’ve known “the Buzz” who knew how to finesse the faculty and the board to get things done. You’ve worked beside “the Buzz” who could read the room and knew when to push harder and when to back down. It’s a gift to be able to lead that way.
For many of us who are younger leaders, we want to lead by feel but have some suspicion that the kind of mastery that a Buzz demonstrates may forever elude us. Against the current backdrop of Christian institutional life in which challenges are harder to anticipate and a successful past is no guarantor of a bright future to lead by feel seems like a precarious luxury.
In some ways, though, it has always been this way. While today’s challenges may feel especially daunting and the climate for Christian institutions particularly uncertain, to lead by feel is a honed gift, not a native one. Becoming Buzz is a lifelong endeavor, requiring patience, inquisitiveness and resilience.
We must figure out what to notice and what to ignore, when to trust our instincts and when to test our assumptions. We must learn what questions to ask to get us the information we need, let alone what to do with the information once we have it. We will get it wrong from time to time.
Looking to Buzz for inspiration, it took 26 years of reading the night sky for him to say the forecast was wrong one September evening.
